Scary Feeling.

I've just spent the last hour, cleaning out my desk, throwing away birthday cards and personal items and emailing personal documents on my computer to my home email address.

I am anticipating that I am going to be fired tomorrow.

For a small fuckup, shipping 5 documents instead of 6, to a company in St. Louis which is considering us for a business proposal. I mis-read a written instruction of "ship original + 5 copies" against a verbal instruction of "I've made one of them for you" and made 4 copies to go with the original. 5 total. Instead of 5 copies and 1 original.

And it all plays into my bosses favorite theme of, "YOU don't pay attention to details and screw up by assuming that you know what you're doing, when you don't. And you don't ask for clarification when you don't understand something."

The thing is...

I DO pay attention to details. I try my damnest to pay attention to details. it's just that hastily written instructions on a Post It note sometimes aren't all that clear. And when I have a phone conversation after I read a Post It Note instruction, I assume what was said is the final authority.

And yes, when I think I understand something, Of course, I am going to proceed forward and get it done. Why wouldn't I? Why would I keep second guessing myself, when to me, the instructions are clear.

And Finally, how can I ask to clarify something that I think I understand? How can I ask for information that I don't have, if I don't know that I don't have it? Who does that?

God, he was SOOOOOOOOOO angry with me about this. When I tried to understand to explain, he just told me to "shut the fuck up" and that I was going to have to take an immediate flight to St. Louis to rectify this fuckup. This latest fuckup. As in, one in a long series of...

Which is a terrible place to work. Where someone is already starting with the assumption that a fuckup is GOING to happen. He's only waiting around for WHEN it's going to happen.

I threw away 2 years of birthday cards. 2 years of Admin Assistant Day cards. a nice note from a company that thanked me for tracking down a check that they'd accidentally sent me. I collected all the books that I've read on lunch breaks into a single box. All of my private documents are in a single folder, ready to pack up. From my computer, I've emailed myself copies of Playground Incubator documents, a folder of electro-pictures of the last girl that I loved, the outline for the childrens book that I want to write, pictures of my improv team, a collection of interesting articles that I've seen on CIN, about improv. A belt. A calendar.

Everything is collected up or deleted or thrown away. I can be fired tomorrow at the start or end of the day and pick up a box and a folder and walk out the door, leaving no trace behind.

I'm truly heartbroken. This wasn't how I wanted to end my career here. Or anywhere for that matter.

I wish I'd seen this coming...

COB out...